


Infinity Spirals Out Creation (the Leave No Man Behind remix)

by Trojie



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Addiction, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Nightmares, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2012-04-10
Packaged: 2017-11-03 09:18:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dreamshare is an addiction with some nasty side-effects. Eames and Arthur have a working solution, but when Cobb brings Ariadne into the team, they start to realise that not everyone has a safety-net.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infinity Spirals Out Creation (the Leave No Man Behind remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [recrudescence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Infinity Spirals Out Creation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/149808) by [recrudescence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/recrudescence/pseuds/recrudescence). 



> Some dialogue quoted from the original fic.

They haven't seen each other in six months, so when Eames fetches up at the Paris address Cobb gave him, he's expecting exactly what he sees - Arthur all buttoned up tight and looking after everyone else, lines etched deep at the corners of his mouth. He's watching Cobb dream with a slip of a girl, and Eames sidles up to stand beside him and asks, 'Did you bring your sound-machine?'

Arthur's hollow-eyed expression has already told Eames the answer, but the point-man still says, 'No,' without looking away from the sleepers. Over at the far end of the room, Yusuf is busily unpacking his equipment. Eames tips him a wave and gets saluted with a burette in sarcastic reply.

Back to Arthur, he asks, 'And is your Glock good at keeping you company?'

Arthur does turn at that, rolling his eyes and not bothering to hide it. 'You were in Mombasa,' he says.

Well, it's true.

Arthur fishes in his pocket for a moment and then hands over a hotel keycard. Eames puts it in his own pocket and asks the perennial question, 'What did you tell Cobb this time?'

Arthur shrugs. 'He's stopped asking.' The point-man turns back to the dreamers he's supervising. 'He understands.'

Eames doesn't quite think he does, actually. 'He still thinks we're sleeping together, doesn't he?' It's logical, but wrong.

'We are sleeping together,' Arthur points out.

Eames shrugs one-shouldered. 'Be less literal. He thinks we're _sleeping together_.'

Arthur checks his watch and hits play on Cobb's MP3 player. 'Probably.' His body language appends, _'So?'_

Changing tack, Eames asks, 'Who's the girl?' as she and Cobb start to stir.

'Architect,' Arthur says, which isn't quite the correct answer, before scooting to her side to extract the needle. She's clearly new - she starts and almost thrashes when she comes to. Probably an actual architect then, or rather - Eames eyes the scarf, the second-hand air of her cardigan - a student. A complete amateur, in other words. For _inception_.

If it weren't for the fact that he's seen Cobb pull miracles out of his arse when pushed, and that Arthur's here to back him up, Eames would be on the first plane right back to Mombasa right now.

When she's stopped flailing, Arthur beckons Eames over. Cobb, in the chair next to her, runs a hand through his floppy blond hair and nods at Eames as he passes. 'Eames, Ariadne,' Arthur says, introducing them. The girl's handshake is like a tiny sliver of steel in Eames's great big mitt. 'Eames is our forger.'

She cocks her head, sharp brown eyes fixing on Eames', and extracts her hand. 'You impersonate people,' she says - half accusing, half intrigued. She's American. Interesting - Eames was expecting someone French, given their location and the fact that, from the little he's been told, they recruited her here.

'Broadly speaking,' Eames says. 'And you're our architect?' He gets the feeling she's assessing him.

'Yeah. Uh, Cobb?' she says, turning to the extractor to ask a question, and Eames spots the tiny dab of blood beading on her wrist where she's been too distracted to wipe it away, and as she starts to dissect dream-physics, he starts to wonder.

***

Men on the front lines used to share foxholes for security and practicality and warmth, which is a practicality in and of itself in winter. This is much the same thing, Eames tells himself every time he swipes into a new room.

This foxhole is beautifully appointed, the twin beds are accommodatingly large, and the tea- and coffee-making facilities are, as always, well-stocked. Somehow Arthur always manages to pick the hotel with the widest selection of teabags and coffee, meaning Eames can always practice the idiosyncracies of whomever he's learning for their job. Browning is a black coffee man, sometimes with a nip of whiskey in it in the evenings, or so says Arthur's preliminary dossier on him.

Taking the bed furthest from the door (Arthur prefers to be closer to the exit, for various reasons), Eames gets started on his own research; lounging half-up against the wall with his papers in a stack next to him, coffee in hand, and toys with lighting a cigar for some added verisimilitude but doesn't.

Arthur gets in at about two in the morning.

'Still up?'

'It's ten am in Sydney,' Eames points out, half-engrossed in a breakdown of Browning's expenses for the past year and wondering if there's anything he can do with the fact that the man obviously has a mistress stashed somewhere in Boston. Meanwhile, Arthur starts shuffling around the room, sorting out his things.

'Does that mean you're staying up?' Arthur asks in a muffled voice, probably pulling his jumper off.

'I'll be quiet,' Eames promises. There's a click and Eames twists to look. Arthur is putting bits and pieces on the bedside table between them - cufflinks, watch, Glock - next to Eames's things (cufflinks, watch, Browning Hi-Power).

'I know.'

Arthur sleeps in his pants and undershirt, and they've been doing this room-sharing while working together for long enough that he's completely unselfconscious about stripping to that state with Eames half-watching. 'G'night,' he says shortly, climbing into bed, and clicks off his lamp. The only light in the room now is that which is pooling around Eames.

The financial report is left somewhat forgotten as Eames watches Arthur in the process of falling asleep, and starts to follow suit. Insomnia is appeased by the safe feeling created by Arthur's slow, deep breathing and the shadowy shapes of the pistols on the table between them. And so Eames sleeps, eventually.

Two hours later, Arthur's up again, padding around the room scratching his hip absentmindedly above the waistband of his underpants. He's pacing, Eames realises after a groggy minute watching him.

'Something on your mind?' Eames asks, letting his voice drag huskily, hinting audibly at sleep.

When Arthur turns to face him it's painfully clear that he's not really awake. 'We're gonna lose her,' he mutters like he's in a trance. At least he's not holding his weapon.

'Who?' Eames asks gently.

'Ariadne. She's gonna follow him down.' No prizes for guessing who the 'him' is. There are a few things that prey on Arthur's mind and Eames doesn't blame him a bit for it, even if he thinks it's a lesson in why loyalty's a dangerous thing to have. 'I don't - he's drowning, and he's gonna drag her down-'

'We can look after her,' Eames promises him, and that seems to do the trick. Arthur sits back down on his mattress. 'Go back to bed.'

'Yeah,' says Arthur, and lies down. Sometimes it's that easy. Sometimes it isn't.

Two hours after that, it's Eames who's up and Arthur who talks him down. All he remembers is that he shot himself. Must have been in his fractured dreams, surely, because his pistol is still on the bedside table when they both come to at their 6.30am alarm.

There's a bruise forming on his wrist and the back of his hand, though. He prods at it and raises an eyebrow at Arthur, who's watching him while tying his tie. Arthur just shrugs. Before he picks up his pistol and holsters it, Eames notes that the things on the bedside table aren't exactly where he remembers them being before he went to sleep, and the Hi-Power has been unloaded.

Arthur hands him back his bullets and never says a word. But that's the point, this is why they do this sharing thing. Because you have to know, if you're going to stand on the edge of a cliff, that someone will catch you when you fall.

***

A few times after he gets back from tailing Browning, Eames sees Ariadne and Arthur having terse, whispered conversations, and he tracks their eyelines back to Cobb every time - Cobb feverishly spinning his top or Cobb under alone, plugged into the PASIV like it recharges his batteries. Eventually Ariadne always goes back to her cardstock models and Arthur goes back to his Moleskine.

'If I told you I was having some worries about our beloved leader, what would you say?' Eames murmurs in Arthur's ear in passing one afternoon.

'I'd tell you to go fuck yourself,' says Arthur conversationally, looking up at him with his pen tapping against his lower lip. 'Cobb can take care of himself.'

'Thought so. And if I asked after the health of our delightfully talented and well-dressed architect?'

Arthur glances sideways at her, engrossed in her own beautiful brand of precise sculpture. 'We need to watch out for her,' he says quietly. 'Both of us.'

'Because she can't take care of herself?'

Arthur pauses, and sighs. 'Because she's too much like Cobb.'

 _Because who else will?_ Eames asks himself rhetorically.

***

There are times when Eames lies awake humming under his breath because Arthur needs white noise. There are times when Eames wakes up and he's got someone's gun in his hand and is standing by the door like he's on sentry duty. And Arthur never says a word, just takes the weapon and tells Eames it's not his watch any more.

There are times when Eames wants a person, a warm body, sleeping next to him more than anything. There are times he wakes up screaming from the dreams he isn't having any more, hasn't had for years - all he gets now is the feel of them, like distilled nightmare, homeopathic and stupid and empty and _potent_.

There are times when Arthur will turn the room upside-down, tear curtains off their rails and almost disembowel soft furnishings looking for a totem he's convinced he's lost and which Eames can't help him look for because the terror of having _someone else touch your totem_ would probably lead asleep-Arthur to claw his eyes out.

There are times when Arthur will keep his light on and read bits and pieces of inane trivia out loud until Eames dozes off, or when he'll put a pot of tea on at four am even though he doesn't drink it, and the faint smell will send a restless Eames back to sleep.

They've never talked about it. They just get on with it. And more often than anything else, there are times they sit up together all night working, drinking coffee and tea and whiskey and whatever else they can get their hands on, and talking, and those times are worth a lot more than any sleep Eames has ever had on his own.

One night after they've left Cobb at the warehouse alone for the third time in a row, exchanging looks but unable to really say anything about it, Arthur asks, 'Have you ever thought about giving it up? Dreamshare, I mean.'

Eames thinks about it now, and shrugs. 'And then what would I do? Go back to picking pockets?'

Arthur acknowledges that with half a quick smile, one corner of his mouth lifting and then dropping again. 'Do you ever wish you'd never started, then?'

'If you're thinking about Ariadne, Arthur, don't. We need her. And she walked back in there of her own free will.'

'Cobb gave her a taste without telling her what she was getting into,' Arthur mutters. 'I don't like it, all right?'

Eames dares to put a hand on Arthur's shoulder, the warmth of him bleeding through fine wool and silk, the strength of him hard under Eames's fingers. 'We can look after her,' he says, wondering if Arthur remembers this from his sleepwalking the other night. 'She's not alone.'

'I hope she knows that,' Arthur says.

***

The team moves to Sydney in time to crash Fischer's flight to LA. There isn't a lot of choice of hotel rooms in a crowded holiday-season city when you can't all stay in the same place for reasons of stealth but you can't stay out in the sticks for reasons of not getting stuck in an unforeseen traffic jam.

Which is how Eames and Arthur end up sharing a double bed in a jam-packed hotel, in a room that they only got because someone cancelled at the last minute.

'Sorry,' says Arthur. He shrugs. 'It was all they had.'

'Don't worry about it.' How can Eames explain that this is perfect without sounding like he's got some kind of ulterior motive? He hasn't slept the whole night in the same bed as someone in years - too risky on too many levels. But like on so many other fronts, Arthur's the exception here, and Eames is so, so tired.

It seems impossible. It's boiling in this stupid city, and they both strip down to underpants and end up kicking the bedcovers off, and their room is a sweatbox. But they _sleep_.

In fact Eames only wakes once, just once, raises his muzzy head enough to recognise that the curled-up shape on the other side of the bed is Arthur, and then lies back down again. He's drifting off again when another hand finds his half-buried under the pillow, and tangles their fingers tight.

Eames has never slept so well in his life as he does the night before attempting inception, half a foot away from a colleague whose last name he doesn't even know.

***

It takes. Despite everything, it takes, and it's because Ariadne's brilliant and Arthur's dedicated. Eames dies three times to get back to reality, and each time flickers into the next and it's addictive, he wakes reeling and scrambling for totem and pistol - if he's still not out, he could, he could shoot -

His totem is body-warm and unchangeable cheap casino plastic. And across the aisle, Arthur shakes his head at him sharply, something hot in his eyes. _No_ , he's saying. _This is reality. We're here._

This is why Eames could never, would never, give up the Somnacin.

***

The next time Eames sees Arthur, it's the day of Miles's funeral.

Eames doesn't know how he feels about the old man. On the one hand, would anything, any of this, have been possible without him? He was the first architect, the first person who saw the huge potential infinity and flexibility of dreamshare; the man who freed it from being a glorified military version of the Colosseum. Without that, without him, Eames would probably be in prison by now for committing the same crimes in much less beautiful ways.

On the other hand, by dint of all of that, he opened up the way for people like Eames and Arthur and Cobb and Ariadne to end up stuck in that looking-glass world - ruined by having magical powers one moment and being ordinary the next, drugged on the interplay between their own conscious and subconscious minds, addicted to dreams, unable to function in a standard, circadian way any more.

Somnacin is like nicotine. In and of itself, it doesn't hurt you. It's just ferociously addictive and it carries with it a whole host of nasty things, like if tar and pesticides could fill up your brain. If Miles had stayed in Paris and built things out of bricks and mortar, Eames would be able to sleep at nights, and he would never be anything more than the man he is. 

Arthur finds him after the service and just drops a keycard into his pocket without saying a word. At least, not a word about the keycard. 'Have you seen Ariadne?' he asks.

'She's here?'

Arthur gives Eames a Look. 'He was her teacher. She'll be here.'

He slides off to search for her, weaving his way through the throng of mourners, and Eames slowly follows him, like backup. Eventually, Arthur finds Ariadne. Point-man, after all.

He doesn't say much to her, but she starts to cry, and Eames drifts over without wanting to seem too solicitous - they're only colleagues, to everyone else here. But he can see from the bags under her eyes and the tight expression under her tears that she's just like him. Just like Arthur. Miles's protege, Cobb's pupil, fulfilling all her glorious potential.

'What have you done _now_?' he asks Arthur, half-joking.

'She's not doing well,' Arthur mutters at him. 'I think - she needs us, all right Eames? Just work with me.'

Eames has never done anything else.

They get her to a chair, and she confesses. It's a plea, one that Eames has heard echoing around his own head often enough, until Arthur. _I just want to sleep_.

Eames wants to bundle her into bed and protect her. Somewhat amazingly, she lets him. Well, lets them. Eames gets to use his swipecard to beep them all in, all three of them, and she gets a nap in while he watches her sleep, the way he watches Arthur - quietly providing presence, company. It isn't until Arthur is padding around picking up clothing and sorting things out to their usual liking that Eames notices that the bed Ariadne's in is the only one in the room.

Her nap lasts two hours, barely any time at all for how she looks and how little sleep she's had, from what she's told them, and then she leaves, much against Eames's better judgement.

'She's got it bad,' Arthur says after she's wandered off again. 'It doesn't normally catch up that fast, but maybe it was the three layers on the Fischer job… or Yusuf's special cocktail…'

'It's done,' Eames says, shrugging. 'The question now is, are we sure it's a good idea to let her go?'

Arthur sighs. 'We can't chain her up,' he points out. 'At least she's got that much sleep. And she knows something that might help now.'

'Forgive me if I don't find the idea of her wandering around looking for random bed partners appealing.' It's only after he's said it that Eames realises just how possessive that sounds.

Arthur half-smiles. 'She'll be back.'

'I fucking well hope so.' Eames looks at Arthur, and he's still hollow-eyed. 'Get in the bed.'

'What if she comes back?'

'I'll wait. I'm not tired.'

Arthur gives him a look that says, _Bullshit_ , but he drops trou anyway, strips down and gets under the covers. Eames stays where he is, sitting on the other side. 'So, we're sharing again,' he says after a while, when Arthur is looking dozy but still blinking and awake.

'Worked last time.'

'That it did.'

Arthur starts to drift again after a while, and Eames would like very much to get into the bed and do the same, but he promised to wait up. He hopes Ariadne comes back. If she doesn't, he's going to go looking for her tomorrow. Arthur will know her address. Eames has never thought of himself as a knight in shining armour, but he was trained long ago to never leave a man behind.

Just after midnight, she knocks. 'No luck?' he asks as he unbolts the door. 'Figured as much.'

She looks so small, standing there with her overnight bag. 'There's nothing to be ashamed of, you know,' he says, ushering her in. 'Arthur used to need one of those sound-machines to help him sleep, back when he was young and fit. Whale song, babbling brook, the whole bit.' He doesn't say that he's pretty sure Arthur's still got it somewhere, just in case, the same way he always carries an extra passport and doesn't unload his pistol at night.

Ariadne's still looking shell-shocked, zombified, unbuttoning her coat to reveal pyjamas underneath, so Eames steers her towards the bed. Arthur, still clearly trying to hold onto the last dregs of his doze, flaps the covers open to her. 'Lie down. Sleep,' he orders her. 'I don't care if you kick, snore, drool, talk to yourself, or need to wake someone up every fifteen minutes.'

With some amusement, Eames realises it's a litany of his own nocturnal sins. Arthur opens his eyes to slits and dimples at Eames before adding, 'Also, sound-machines might not be sophisticated, but they _work_.' The 'asshole' is implied but not articulated.

'Thanks,' says Ariadne, muffled by the duvet.

Eames shuffles out of his outerwear and finally gets to sink into the mattress himself, bracketing Ariadne with a decent distance between them. But she moves in her night-terrors, towards warmth and comfort, and Eames can't help but try to soothe her when she curls into his orbit. 'It's okay,' he tells her, trying to still her. 'You're going to be fine, pet, just fine.' A hand passes accidentally along his stomach and he realises, his eyes picking out the movement in the dark, that Arthur's wrapped his arms around her and is calming her like that. 'You're alright,' Eames keeps whispering, and reaches one hand down to pet at where Arthur's cuddling her, his strong arm against her hip. 'Everything's all right.'

'It's not your fault,' Arthur murmurs in her ear. 'It's not fair, but it's not your fault. We've got you.'

'I don't know how,' she gasps. 'I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Am I going crazy?' Her eyes are all dark, all panic in the gloom.

'You never had the training,' Eames says. Her hair is wild and soft under his fingers as he strokes it away from her face. 'There's nothing wrong with you. How could you be ready for this?'

'This happens to everyone,' Arthur says. 'This happens to everyone, I swear. You're not alone.'

Eventually she settles again and dozes off with them cuddled around her, trying to ward off whatever it is that's haunting her in her dreams with their presence.

'I remember what this was like,' Eames mutters, gently pushing a lock of hair back behind Ariadne's ear. 'Every bloody night.'

'Me too,' Arthur says. He pushes up on one elbow, leaning over Ariadne. 'Hey Eames?' he says thoughtfully.

'Yeah?' Eames replies, propping himself up too. 'What's the matter? We should be following her example.'

'I know,' Arthur says, and then pulls Eames close and kisses him, soft and smelling of hotel washing powder and the remains of his aftershave, tasting of sleep. 'You're better than a sound-machine, you know,' he says when they come up for air, and Eames knows exactly what he means.


End file.
